Matthew Norman: Oops - he's gone and shot someone again

Lying in my morning bath one day earlier this week, I heard something on the Radio 4 news that gave me quite a turn. I can't quote Brian Perkins exactly, but the gist was that a policeman involved in the failure properly to investigate complaints against the ex-boyfriend who went on to kill a woman has been sacked by Derbyshire police.

Admittedly, neither the Chief Constable nor any senior figure in that force appears to have thought to resign themselves for what was an unusual fiasco even by our own police's standards. Even so, to encounter the words "a policeman" and "has been sacked" in the same sentence was such a visceral shock that I went into spontaneous ague, and was for several minutes rendered incapable of gripping the soap. Whatever might you hear on a bulletin next, I wondered. "More than a dozen Labour MPs have followed their consciences in a Commons vote about Iraq"? "George W Bush has learnt to tie his shoelaces"? "Arsène Wenger later said that he saw the incident very clearly, and will be disciplining his defender for the foul"?

This sort of thing just doesn't happen in Britain, where not a single officer has appeared in a dock for any of the 1,000-plus deaths in police custody over the last 40 years, and where the Police Federation glories in its status as the last remnant of militant, closed-shop 1970s-style trade unionism, fiercely shielding its members from the legal constraints that apply to the rest of us.

We do have a body known as The Police Complaints Commission, of course, but so craven is it that the only police complaints with any relevance are the phantasmal medical ones which so often permit an officer under investigation to join some 30 per cent of his colleagues on sick leave, where he may remain drawing a full salary until retirement. So a policeman sacked for nothing more than gross incompetence? How can this be?

By yesterday, this aberration had been all but forgotten, and the status quo duly restored. Although never named, one of the marksmen who killed Jean Charles de Menezes might now be known as Britney Spears, by way of that hilarious locker-room banter at which our coppers excel, because Oops, he's done it again.

The details of his latest hit are predictably sketchy, all we know for sure being that he gunned down a man suspected of being involved in an armed robbery in Kent. It is alleged that the suspect shot first, although whether this US-style killing was really warranted is something we will never find out thanks to the cloak of self-serving secrecy that swathes all such enquiries into possible police malfeasance.

The fact that there's every chance in this case that he had no choice but to shoot, as his colleagues assert, seems to me anything but the point. The major question, clearly, is how on earth he came to be returned to his old duties. What does it say about Scotland Yard that a very senior officer deemed it wise for a member of the trigger-happy team that panicked catastrophically when faced with an unarmed Brazilian electrician to be reunited with his gun?

What absolute contempt for the memory of Mr Menezes and the sensibilities of his family is implied by the decision to enable the unnamed shooter to shoot again on the ineffably nebulous grounds that the Crown Prosecution Service felt it lacked the evidence (or far more likely, the stomach for the ensuing political fight) to charge him with a criminal offence?

Through a mixture of doubt about the psychological reliability of those involved and plain respect for Mr de Menezes, a half civilised police force would never have dreamt of arming those officers again. Scotland Yard waited a year, and the moment they were "cleared" put them back in the front line. It beggars belief.

This week has also seen the police advocate the storage of the entire populace's DNA on a national database. They believe that a sample of genetic material should be taken from new born babies, and what a gloriously telling commentary on modern Britain it would be if a human being's first brush with officialdom, even before the birth certificate has been registered, should be in his or her capacity as a future criminal suspect.

As always when such repugnant ideas are touted, those propounding them answer every objection with the cretinous catch-all argument of the proto-tyrant through the ages. If you are a law-abiding citizen, they parrot, what could you possibly have to fear from the existence of a permanent record of your DNA?

I'll tell them what we have to fear. We have them to fear. Apart from the visceral antipathy towards and moral queasiness about living in a surveillance state (by the way, does anyone remember voting for the manifesto that pledged to photograph us every three feet as we walk to the local newsagent?), the dangers posed by a national DNA database are blatantly obvious.

As things are, police officers routinely sell snippets about criminals and private details about celebrities to the red-top newspapers. Leaving aside the money that could be made by flogging information about predisposition to future illnesses to life insurance companies, imagine what they could have made from passing to The News of the World the fact that Hughie Green was Paula Yates's father. Imagine the scope for blackmail, extortion and general profiteering such a database would offer.

At this point, no doubt, spokespersons would get their truncheons in a frightful twist, trotting out with pious fury the traditional verity that the British police are the least corrupt in the world. Even in the unlikely event that they are, they wouldn't remain so for long in the face of such temptation.

The sad fact is that we no longer trust a police force disgracefully over-indulged by successive governments since Margaret Thatcher politicised them by unleashing them like attack dogs against the striking miners, and we will not begin to trust them again until a Home Secretary has the balls to take on the Police Federation (Ken Clarke might have had a crack, bless his belligerent heart, had he stayed longer in that job), and to reintroduce the quaint-sounding principle that the police not only enforce the law of the land but are no less subject to it than we poor sods who pay their wages.

How the police came to be permitted effectively to police themselves is a national scandal that has done colossal damage to the relationship between police and public. Undeniably, the current system doesn't work. If it did, the marksman who shot dead that alleged armed robber in Kent would never have been allowed near so much as a radar gun again.

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